Giulio Tononi (2008) has offered his integrated information theory of consciousness (IITC) as a “provisional manifesto.” I critically examine how the approach fares. I point out some (relatively) internal concerns with the theory and then more broadly philosophical ones; finally I assess the prospects for IITC as a fundamental theory of consciousness. I argue that the IITC’s scientific promise does carry over to a significant extent to broader philosophical theorizing about qualia and consciousness, though not as directly as Tononi suggests, (...) since the account is much more focused on the qualitative character of experience rather than on consciousness itself. I propose understanding it as “integrated information theory of qualia” (IITQ), rather than of consciousness. (shrink)

If we follow a traditional reading of Descartes and throw in some of our favorite German philosophers (Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, for instance) we can isolate a doctrinal current that says that the pure intellect has no immediate access to the extra-mental world. This reduction of experience to reason forces the question of the external world’s existence, leading to Heidegger’s assertion that the scandal of philosophy was not that it had yet to furnish a proof for the external world’s existence, (...) as Kant thought, but that the question emerged in the first place. Prior to representing realities, the human being dwells in the world. Knowing is, thus, founded on Being-in-the-world. Once this is remembered, it seems quite extraneous to inquire about the existence of the external world, since it is given as part of the structure of human experience. But, if the question of the external world's existence arises when we reduce experience to rational experience, then we have learned something important about the structures involved in knowing the world. Knowing succeeds by breaking away from Being-in-theworld. As Levinas says, "it is still and always a solitude" (EI 60). Though knowledge might begin as a mode of Being-in-the-world, it succeeds by turning its back on these origins and entering upon another terrain. Thus, Heidegger's recourse to the external world could not be within knowledge. Instead, he grounded it in concern, the primordial way in which the human being dwells in the world. Knowing is but one way in which the human being exhibits this concern. Where Husserl showed the limits of representation to be within the parameters of the transcendental ego, Heidegger pushed the frontiers of the world down to another level, the level of function. On this level, the human being dwells as a worker; things are construed as implements for-the-sake-of something else. These implements refer to other implements in a referential totality guided by "circumspection." The world of function is held together as a totality by an intricate web of references, each pointing to others.. (shrink)

The “information age” is often thought in terms of the digital revolution that begins with Turing’s 1937 paper, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” However, this can only be partially correct. There are two aspects to Turing’s work: one dealing with questions of computation that leads to computer science and another concerned with building computing machines that leads to computer engineering. Here, we emphasize the latter because it shows us a Turing connected with mechanisms of information flow (...) rather than solely with the mathematical and logical problems of computability for which he is better known. Our reasons for doing so will become clear in what follows. In fact, the 1937 paper just mentioned provides a general schematic for building a computing machine; this mechanical connection puts Turing on an historical continuum with others who discovered mechanisms to cope with information. Of those involved in this quest in the 19th Century, two people in particular, Edison and Bell, had explicit visions of an information age that would follow from their work. Because they were explicitly aware of what they were doing and partly brought it about long before 1937, they deserve substantial credit for the information age they set out to inaugurate. Regarding one purely mechanical and non-electronic technology, Edison noted ten uses for the phonograph, including not only the replication of sound, but also “connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication”. Even though the telephone was only two years old when Edison wrote of a network made up of mechanical hard storage systems and people connected by wire, the network vision was already clearly in his head. (shrink)

We can discern three types of amoral beings in Kant ’s ethical philosophy, one kind of moral being, the true moral agent, and one kind of immoral being, for five kinds in all: B1) beings that are driven solely by inclination, such as animals. B2) beings that act solely out of reason and, therefore, duty, such as divine intellects.

Most theories of learning would predict a gradual acquisition and refinement of skills as learning progresses, and while some highlight exponential growth, this fails to explain why natural cognitive development typically progresses in stages. Models that do span multiple developmental stages typically have parameters to “switch” between stages. We argue that by taking an embodied view, the interaction between learning mechanisms, the resulting behavior of the agent, and the opportunities for learning that the environment provides can account for the stage-wise (...) development of cognitive abilities. We summarize work relevant to this hypothesis and suggest two simple mechanisms that account for some developmental transitions: neural readiness focuses on changes in the neural substrate resulting from ongoing learning, and perceptual readiness focuses on the perceptual requirements for learning new tasks. Previous work has demonstrated these mechanisms in replications of a wide variety of infant language experiments, spanning multiple developmental stages. Here we piece this work together as a single model of ongoing learning with no parameter changes at all. The model, an instance of the Epigenetic Robotics Architecture embodied on the iCub humanoid robot, exhibits ongoing multi-stage development while learning pre-linguistic and then basic language skills. (shrink)

The workshop – presented by the director of a new center and the coordinator of an alliance intended to amplify and extend the influence of an established center – focused on the challenges involved in founding, growing, and sustaining centers for business ethics within university business schools. The discussion draws on experience at the Center for Business and Society, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, and the Center for Business Ethics, Bentley College and Bentley’s Alliance for Ethics & Social (...) Responsibility. (shrink)

El artículo plantea la actualidad y pertinencia de la Filosofía de la información de Luciano Floridi, considerada a la luz de las revoluciones científicas de Occidente y de la instauración de nuevos paradigmas, tanto en las ciencias como en la filosofía. La analogía con el “giro matemático” de la Modernidad permite establecer el alcance revolucionario de la obra de Floridi, cuya aceptación implicará superar el obstáculo epistemológico del escolasticismo, en función del dinamismo histórico inherente al progreso científico.

Understanding probabilities as something other than point values has often been motivated by the need to find more realistic models for degree of belief, and in particular the idea that degree of belief should have an objective basis in “statistical knowledge of the world.” I offer here another motivation growing out of efforts to understand how chance evolves as a function of time. If the world is “chancy” in that there are non-trivial, objective, physical probabilities at the macro-level, then the (...) chance of an event e that happens at a given time is \ until it happens. But whether the chance of e goes to one continuously or not is left open. Discontinuities in such chance trajectories can have surprising and troubling consequences for probabilistic analyses of causation and accounts of how events occur in time. This, coupled with the compelling evidence for quantum discontinuities in chance’s evolution, gives rise to a “continuity bind” with respect to chance probability trajectories. I argue that a viable option for circumventing the continuity bind is to understand the probabilities “imprecisely,” that is, as intervals rather than point values. I then develop and motivate an alternative kind of continuity appropriate for interval-valued chance probability trajectories. (shrink)

Although work on computational and robotic modelling of cognition is highly diverse, as an empirical method it can be roughly divided into at least two clearly different, though non-exclusive branches, motivated to evaluate the sufficiency or the necessity of theories when it comes to accounting for data and/or other observations. With the rising profile of theories of situated/embodied cognition, a third non-exclusive avenue for investigation has also gained in popularity, the investigation of agent-environment embedding or more generally, exploration. Still in (...) its infancy, and often confused with sufficiency testing, this relatively new kind of modelling, which is theory- rather than data-driven, investigates the role of the environment in shaping the ontogenetic and/or phylogenetic development of situated agency. Each of these three approaches presents many issues that modellers must be sensitive to, both in the design of experiments, and in the conclusions that can be drawn from them. This paper highlights some of these issues, provides examples, and addresses the contribution of computational/robotic modelling to cognitive science, as well as some of its limitations. (shrink)

Critiquing any practice, theory, or law, requires understanding the characteristics of the environment which created a need for this law. There are hundreds of different cultures in the world, and each one has its own set of norms, characteristics, and values. What in one country is perceived normal, ethical or unethical, right or wrong, may not be the same somewhere else in the world. The first civilizations begun in Africa and Europe many thousands of years ago when people were hunters (...) and nomads, it is not unreasonable to suspect that many of those traits and characteristics have been socially transferred and/or inherited by future generations. (shrink)

This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society and helps organize society’s (...) resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social-structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic-scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones. (shrink)

Analyses of singular causation often make use of the idea that a cause increases the probability of its effect. Of particular salience in such accounts are the values of the probability function of the effect, conditional on the presence and absence of the putative cause, analysed around the times of the events in question: causes are characterized by the effect’s probability function being greater when conditionalized upon them. Put this way, it becomes clearer that the ‘behaviour’ of probability functions in (...) small intervals about the times in question ought to be of concern. In this article, I make an extended case that causal theorists employing the ‘probability raising’ idea should pay attention to the continuity question. Specifically, if the probability functions are ‘jumping about’ in ways typical of discontinuous functions, then the stability of the relevant probability increase is called into question. The rub, however, is that sweeping requirements for either continuity or discontinuity are problematic and, as I argue, this constitutes a ‘continuity bind’. Hence more subtle considerations and constraints are needed, two of which I consider: utilizing discontinuous first derivatives of continuous probability functions, and abandoning point probability for imprecise probability. _1_ Introduction _2_ Probability Trajectories and Continuity _2.1_ Probability trajectories _2.2_ Causation as discontinuous jumps _2.3_ Against systematic discontinuity _3_ Broader Discontinuity Concerns _4_ The Continuity Bind _4.1_ Retaining continuity with discontinuous first derivatives _4.2_ Imprecise probability trajectories _5_ Concluding Remarks Appendix. (shrink)

In his famous 1950 paper where he presents what became the benchmark for success in artificial intelligence, Turing notes that "at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted" (Turing 1950, 442). Kurzweil (1990) suggests that Turing's prediction was correct, even if no machine has yet to pass the Turing Test. In the wake of the (...) computer revolution, research in artificial intelligence and cognitive science has pushed in the direction of interpreting "thinking" as some sort of computational process. On this understanding, thinking is something computers (in principle) and humans (in practice) can both do. It is difficult to say precisely when in history the meaning of the term "thinking" headed in this direction. Signs are already present in the mechanistic and mathematical tendencies of the early Modern period, and maybe even glimmers are apparent in the ancient Greeks themselves. But over the long haul, we somehow now consider "thinking" as separate from the categories of "thoughtfulness" (in the general sense of wondering about things), "insight" and "wisdom." Intelligent machines are all around us, and the world is populated with smart cars, smart phones and even smart (robotic) appliances. But, though my cell phone might be smart, I do not take that to mean that it is thoughtful, insightful or wise. So, what has become of these latter categories? They seem to be bygones left behind by scientific and computational conceptions of thinking and knowledge that no longer have much use for them. In 2000, Allen, Varner and Zinser addressed the possibility of a Moral Turing Test (MTT) to judge the success of an automated moral agent (AMA), a theme that is repeated in Wallach and Allen (2009).. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a variety of agents that appear in Kantian ethics in order to determine which would be necessary to make a robot a genuine moral agent. However, building such an agent would require that we structure into a robot’s behavioral repertoire the possibility for immoral behavior, for only then can the moral law, according to Kant, manifest itself as an ought, a prerequisite for being able to hold an agent morally accountable for its actions. Since building (...) a moral robot requires the possibility of immoral behavior, I go on to argue that we cannot morally want robots to be genuine moral agents, but only beings that simulate moral behavior. Finally, I raise but do not answer the question that if morality requires us to want robots that are not genuine moral agents, why should we want something different in the case of human beings. (shrink)

In CyberPhilosophy: The Intersection of Philosophy and Computing, edited by James H. Moor and Terrell Ward Bynum (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 66-77. Also in Metaphilosophy 33.1/2 (2002): 70-82.

Regulating war has long been a concern of the international community. From the Hague Conventions to the Geneva Conventions and the multiple treaties and related institutions that have emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, efforts to mitigate the horrors of war have focused on regulating weapons, defining combatants, and ensuring access to the battlefield for humanitarians. But regulation and legal codes alone cannot be the end point of an engaged ethical response to new weapons developments. This short essay reviews (...) some of the existing ethical works on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS), highlighting how rule- and consequence-based accounts fail to provide adequate guidance for how to deal with them. I propose a virtue-based account, which I link up with an Aristotelian framework, for how the international community might better address these weapons systems. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's approach to politics focuses on action and conduct, rather than institutions, constitutions, and states. In light of Arendtian conceptions of politics, essays in this book challenge conventional IR theories. The contributions on agency explore concepts and categories of political action that enable individuals to act politically and to re-make the world in new, unpredictable ways. The contributions on structure explore how Arendt provides new critical purchase upon often reified structures and categories.

In the beginning was the word, or grunt, or groan, or signal of some sort. This, however, hardly qualifies as an information revolution, at least in any standard technological sense. Nature is replete with meaningful signs, and we must imagine that our early ancestors noticed natural patterns that helped to determine when to sow and when to reap, which animal tracks to follow, what to eat, and so forth. Spoken words at first must have been meaningful in some similar sense. (...) But in time the word became flesh (corpus) and dwelt among us, as "inscription" (literally, to put into writing) inaugurated the dawn of human history. This did not happen instantly. One place to enter the story is with clay tokens to represent trade transactions that in time became accounting tablets and, then, the world's first literature (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.) and codes of law (The Codes of Ur-Nammu, Lipit-Ishtar, Hammurabi, and so forth.) This event happened around the north shore of the Persian Gulf sometime in the 4th millennium BCE and was enshrouded in mystery as the role of the scribe trained in the art of inscribing and deciphering signs belonged to the priest (Deibert 1997). With the sanction of religion, writing gave birth to "civility" (literally, life in the city) and defined the line between "history" and "pre-history," the latter being a term designating everything that happened before. There is little doubt that the invention of writing was significant and that it deserves recognition as the first revolution in the history of information. Life as we live it today would have been impossible otherwise. Innovations in writing technologies happened with significant effects, but at various points in the history of information, changes in technology were so dramatic that they reshaped the course of human history in radical ways. The revolution in printing is well-studied; the invention of the printing press and movable type (c.. (shrink)

The term “information” and its various meanings across several domains have spawned a growing research area in the discipline of philosophy known as the philosophy of information (PI). The following briefly outlines a taxonomy of the field addressing: 1) what is the philosophy of information; 2) what is information; 3) open problems in the philosophy of information; 4) paradoxes of information; 5) philosophy as the philosophy of information; 6) information metaphysics; and 7) information ethics.

In this paper, we use the recent appearance of LLMs and GPT-equipped robotics to raise questions about the nature of semantic meaning and how this relates to issues concerning artificially-conscious machines. To do so, we explore how a phenomenology constructed out of the association of qualia (defined as somatically-experienced sense data) and situated within a 4e enactivist program gives rise to intentional behavior. We argue that a robot without such a phenomenology is semantically empty and, thus, cannot be conscious in (...) any way resembling human consciousness. Finally, we use this platform to address and supplement widely-discussed concerns regarding the dangers of attempting to produce artificially-conscious machines. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have experimentally explored various aspects of people’s understandings of subjective experience based on their responses to questions about whether robots “see red” or “feel frustrated,” but the intelligibility of such questions may well presuppose that people understand robots as experiencers in the first place. Departing from the standard approach, I develop an experimental framework that distinguishes 20 between “phenomenal consciousness” as it is applied to a subject (an experiencer) and to an (experiential) mental state and experimentally test (...) folk understandings of both subjective experience and experiencers. My findings (1) reveal limitations in experimental approaches using “artificial experiencers” like robots, (2) indicate that the standard philosophical conception of subjective experience in terms of qualia is distinct from that of the folk, and (3) show that folk intuitions do support a conception of qualia that departs from the philosophical conception in that it is physical rather than metaphysical. These findings have implications for the “hard problem” of consciousness. (shrink)

In his 1961 monograph, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority , the late phenomenologist, Emmanuel Levinas, noted that “everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality” (1961/1969, p. 21). What follows thereafter is an extensive attempt to ground a quasi-Kantian existential ethics based on interpersonal, face to face, relations (Beavers 2001). That philosophy should invite such an attempt already signifies that we might be in trouble where ethics (...) are concerned. After all, when one looks back over history, it appears that we have not made much progress in this area. (shrink)

This essay explores the possibility of universal values. Universal values do not exist as Platonic ideals nor do they exist in clearly defined lists of rules or laws. Rather, universal ethical claims are constructed through the actions of individual political leaders, scholars, and activists. This essay explores how such normative constructions take place. It uses an initiative undertaken by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime to further education around corruption as an example of how such universal values come into (...) existence. The initiative focused on developing teaching materials for higher education. The essay focuses on two particular modules, both their content and the process by which they were written. (shrink)

Theories of global justice range from the utilitarian philosophy of Peter Singer to the institutional design arguments of Thomas Pogge. These works have grappled with a wide range of issues, but almost all of them have been driven by the recognition of two core problems: the huge numbers of people mired in poverty and the increasing levels of inequality. Much of this literature begins with these two problems and then proposes schemes to resolve them. This problem-solving approach to the issue (...) of global poverty and inequality has tended to avoid engagements with figures in the history of political thought. One thinker who has certainly inspired much of this literature, either explicitly or implicitly, is Immanuel Kant. With his rigorous method, systemic structure of metaphysics and morality, and celebration of Enlightenment reason over staid authority structures, Kant presents a model for how to undertake rational arguments in response to moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The Nagel inspired “something-it-is-like” conception of conscious experience remains a dominant approach in philosophy. In this paper I criticize a prevalent philosophical construal of SIL consciousness, one that understands SIL as a property of mental states rather than entities as a whole. I argue against thinking of SIL as a property of states, showing how such a view is in fact prevalent, under-warranted, and philosophically pernicious in that it often leads to an implausible reduction of conscious experience to qualia. I (...) then develop a holistic conception of SIL for entities and argue that it has at least equal pre-empirical warrant, is more conservative philosophically in that it decides less from the a priori “armchair,” and enjoys a fruitful two-way relationship with empirical work. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe thesis of this paper is that there are three basic processes by which a technological innovation is fitted into an existing culture: Rejection, in situations where all interested groups are satisfied with a traditional technology and reject apparently superior innovations because they would force unwanted changes in technology and ideology; Acceptance, in situations where a new technology is embraced by all because it appears to serve the same social and ideological functions as an inferior, or inoperative, traditional technology; (...) and — most commonly in complex societies — conflict over acceptance or rejection, in situations where a new technology introduced or proposed by one group, who perceive it as advancing their interests, is resisted by another group, who perceive it as threatening their welfare. A traditional tripartite concept of culture is employed, distinguishing technology, social organization, and ideology. Four case studies are introduced to illuminate the issue: the Thonga tribesmen of Mozambique, whose occupation as gold and diamond miners at first suited perfectly the requirements of the Thonga lineage and marriage system; the Yir Yoront of Australia, an aboriginal group who found that the steel axe introduced by whites disrupted the patriarchal status system and confounded their mythology; the Senecas, an American Indian tribe that for generations rejected male plow agriculture because their way of life was organized around female horticulture, but who took up male agriculture at the urging of a prophet when traditional male roles disintegrated on the reservation; and the anthracite miners and mine operators of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania, who discovered that fundamental changes in both social organization and ideology were needed in order to cope with catastrophically high rates of industrial accidents attendant on the new system of deep-shaft mining. (shrink)

This paper presents a model for the human experience of eternity based upon an integration of the known properties of the infinities and the creation centered spirituality of Meister Eckhart. The model presents man’s movement through eternity as an ascent of ever greater infinite ontological increases that is asymptotic to God. It implies that time is part of the experience of eternity but to an ever decreasing degree. It also implies that death as a transforming event is recurring but that (...) fear of death is only associated with its first occurrence. (shrink)

I live just off of Bell Road outside of Newburgh, Indiana, a small town of 3,000 people. A mile down the street Bell Road intersects with Telephone Road not as a modern reminder of a technology belonging to bygone days, but as testimony that this technology, now more than a century and a quarter old, is still with us. In an age that prides itself on its digital devices and in which the computer now equals the telephone as a medium (...) of communication, it is easy to forget the debt we owe to an era that industrialized the flow of information, that the light bulb, to pick a singular example, which is useful for upgrading visual information we might otherwise overlook, nonetheless remains the most prevalent of all modern day information technologies. Edison’s light bulb, of course, belongs to a different order of informational devices than the computer, but not so the telephone, not entirely anyway. Alan Turing, best known for his work on the Theory of Computation (1937), the Turing Machine (also 1937) and the Turing Test (1950), is often credited with being the father of computer science and the father of artificial intelligence. Less well-known to the casual reader but equally important is his work in computer engineering. The following lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE, shows Turing in this different light, as a mechanist concerned with getting the greatest computational power from minimal hardware resources. Yet Turing’s work on mechanisms is often eclipsed by his thoughts on computability and his other theoretical interests. This is unfortunate for several reasons, one being that it obscures our picture of the historical trajectory of information technology, a second that it emphasizes a false dichotomy between “hardware” and “software” to which Turing himself did not ascribe but which has, nonetheless, confused researchers who study the nature of mind and intelligence for generations.. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to locate the precise moment in which reason becomes endowed with an ought. In stating the goal in this way, something has already been said about Kant and his project of grounding the metaphysics of morals. But in speaking of a moment (or an instant or an event or an occasion) in which reason becomes endowed with an ought, that is, a moment in which pure reason becomes practical, we have already headed off in (...) a direction beyond the metaphysics of morals. For by invoking the moment, we have invoked something concrete. This distinguishes the current project from the Kantian enterprise in that Kant sought the universal conditions of morality as they followed from a rationality already endowed with an ought. In so doing, he could identify that the ideas of morality and freedom were concomitantly related (along with reason itself), but he could not show that any of these ever materialized in concrete experience. Toward the end of the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, he writes, "we have finally traced the determinate concept of morality back to the idea of freedom, but we could not prove freedom to be something actual in ourselves and in human nature" (GMM 51). On the next page, he writes: ... we are not as yet able to have any insight into why it is that we should divorce ourselves from such interest, i.e., that we should consider ourselves as free in action and yet hold ourselves as subject to certain laws so as to find solely in our own person a worth that can compensate us for the loss of everything that gives worth to our condition. We do not see how this is possible and hence how the moral law can obligate us. One must frankly admit that there is here a sort of circle from which, so it seems, there is no way to escape. (GMM 52. Emphasis is mine.) Even though Kant can align the concepts of freedom, reason and the moral law, it would seem that the obligating force of morality has slipped beneath his grip, and he is left to analyze the idea of moral obligation in its place.1 The present study seeks to return this idea of obligation to its origin.. (shrink)

The Internet allows for the efficient dissemination of texts, thereby creating a rich hypertextual environment that is potentially conducive to stimulating the free exchange of ideas in a manner worthy of the modern scholar. However, the fact that any user whatsoever may disseminate texts in this manner presents two distinct problems. First, finding relevant resources on the Internet may take a fair amount of time and, second, once resources are found, determining their reliability is often difficult if the user is (...) not already an expert in the field of the resource under consideration. These problems -- efficiency in searching and academic quality-control -- are surmountable with existing technology, and many laboratories around the world are working hard to shape this technology into a variety of academic information retrieval services. (shrink)